Roswell, NM: The Day of the Flood (October 19 + 20, 2024)
“Each place is itself only, and nowhere repeated. Miss it and it’s gone.” (Barry Lopez)
“Each place,” Barry Lopez wrote, each place, broad and expansive both spatially and in definition, can be anywhere. It can be wherever you are. On this day the beeping won’t stop. Different tones and rhythms and meanings, but each beep blast an anxious plea. This place is embroiled in emergent movement, which is fitting, because I’m a guest in the Roswell emergency department. Like the actual department, not the waiting room peaking in, but an embodied presence. I am here, shrinking.
This day, in this place, will never be repeated. Even as much as days in rural New Mexico have the propensity to merge and tumble together, feeling indistinguishable from one another, this day and this place is an overlapping flood of epic proportions. Literally. More rainfall fell from the sky over six darkened hours than has ever stormed from the clouds since a mysterious record breaking day in 1901.
It is, to most people, like I’m not here at all. And in my invisible state I’ve heard stories of collapsing houses, washed out vehicles, and submerged bridges. Many of the storytellers are unable to go home or find home or find their way home. The beeping of their real lives. Incessant. Emergent. Anxious.
But one story I heard, a story that didn’t flood together with the others, was from someone who couldn’t make it home to check on their dogs. Moreso, they couldn’t get home to check on their dogs who were waiting in their kennels.
My heart beeps. Beeps. Beeps. Each tear an anxious plea.
Whoever this person was, I could not see them on the other side of the wall, they had to watch things unfold in the comment section of a Facebook post as they searched for an update on the flood levels rising along their home street. I don’t know what they learned. The story washed away.
I don't know when or if they’ll see their dogs again. I don’t know if the water receded after touching the paws of the dogs or if it never breached the house at all.
During a brief reprieve from my practice of emergency department invisibility I went outside to find the sun bright and hot. Roadways were beginning to dry and clean up had commenced. In one direction, at the behest of Mr. Lopez’s reminder not to miss it, it appeared as if the midnight deluge was a dream, of the nightmare variety, and yet in another direction—dystopia. Cars were flipped in canals, sinking into the river. Entire trees had rolled up on sidewalks after beginning their float across town. Brick walls were debris scattered along the ground as a result of the surging water.
I look in the direction where it is now dry, sun blurring my vision, and I squint…
The horizon is amok with floppy ears and wagging tails. Miss it and they’re gone.
